Posted 3 years ago on Sept. 29, 2011, 3:31 a.m. EST by Catherina
(2)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

Please consider preparing short factual bullet point flyers for police about their benefits/pensions being privatized, who's profiting from that (& how much) and how much it's costing each police officer to subsidize the 1% champagne lifestyle.

This is especially needed in states with high rates of police brutality and complicity.

In Egypt, the protesters made sure to get the army rank and file to privately support what they were doing. Brilliant tactic.

This is I think an important point and suggestion. The police / armed forces sit within the 99%, and it must be emphasized to them that what they are defending is: 1) in general terms, morally wrong; 2) they are being betrayed by their employers also. It is an imperative for them to be on-side with the movement to minimize any confrontational transition to a better world.

This 99% / 1% concept is a bit confused... Per Marx (etc.), you have to recognize a 4% "petite-bourgeois" who is not part of the 1%, but, as owners of businesses, benefit from the same policies (to the extent that they benefit from the general regime of privatization of property). As a group that mostly share in the same interests, they can be expected to side with their superiors most of the time.

The police, like the "petite-bourgeois", share in the material interests of the "high bourgeois" -- because the latter pay their checks. And the latter also take care to ensure that they are better taken care of than the masses. (Who even has a pension anymore? And at that young age!) They are a class above the proletariat, by design.

In fact, in this sense (which of course is quite different from the petite-bourgeois sense), almost everyone in society shares in the material interests of the high bourgeois, and entirely by design: every effort is made to give everyone personal incentive to serve the 1%, and is punished for failing to do so. That's what it means to have rich people; that's what having a 1% is.

You also have to recognize that police, who are employed to protect the interests of both the 1% "high bourgeois" and the 4% "petite-bourgeois", do not make any distinction between this 1% and this 4% -- to them, defending banks is the same thing as defending the family who owns a minimart, and if you ask them to talk about it, they'll only think in terms of defending the family business. Police divide the world into "good guys" and "bad guys" along lines that put the 5% strictly in the "good guys" category (until they do something like Madoff: breaking the rules).

Likewise, you have to recognize the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" class who, while firmly fated for a lifetime within the 99%, still identifies with the 1% out of some deluded hope of attaining future fortune. AKA "Joe the Plumber". That may well be most of American voters.